Tatoeba is a project that aims to collect lots of sentences translated in several languages. In this blog you will find, among other things, news and documentation about it.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Grant from Mozilla Drumbeat

Quick summary

Before I get to the point, I'll summarize quickly our story with Drumbeat from the beginning :)

Back in May 2010, we found out about Mozilla Drumbeat and felt that we definitely had our place there. For those who haven't heard of it, Drumbeat is a platform that was launched by Mozilla at the beginning of 2010 and aims to gather projects that keep the Web open -- because Mozilla has been working on an open browser all these years and now they want to work on the open Web.

Since it was (and still kinda is) a young platform, we didn't exactly know what we could/should expect from it, but we felt it was worth trying to join. We mostly wanted to make it to the "featured projects", and perhaps even receive a bit of financial support. We found out about their joint fellowship with the Shuttleworth Foundation and figured we could to participate, and it was even more incentive to join since applying for the fellowship implied creating a project page on Drumbeat. So we did that, following the instructions on how to apply, and then we did our best to get as many people as possible to vote for our project on Drumbeat, so we could reach the top 5 popular projects and get some attention. For those who wonder, I'm not sure what happened to this fellowship project to be honest because I haven't heard from it since then. Perhaps it was dropped, I don't know. But anyways, besides of that, I also had the chance to attend their really awesome and intense events in Paris (in July) and Barcelona (in November) and we were mentioned in one of their newsletters (in August).

Eventually, on December 31st we received really great news: they decided to give the project a $2,500 grant. We were actually told the good news in October, but there wasn't anything really official yet about it and we didn't know how much the project would receive. This time though, it looks official :D So huge, huge thank you to Mozilla Drumbeat! :)

What are we going to do with the money?

So far, we've decided to donate a part of it:

- to the FSF France who's been hosting us for since April 2010.

- to Shtooka who's been helping us for gathering audio (today we have almost 8000 sentences with audio).

- to Tokidoki whose founder has been hosting Tatoeba prior to the FSF France and who has given us ~20,000 French translation of the Tanaka Corpus in the early days of the project.

We'll also start making goodies for our growing fanbase ;) However goodies means designing good stuff to put on a T-shirt or things like that, and we haven't designed anything yet so don't expect the goodies right away. If you're a talented artist and would like to help out, don't hesitate to contat us or come talk to us on IRC (freenode, #tatoeba)!

And we'll probably do a few other things, but we also want to try keeping some of it to pay the transportation and accommodation to attend future events such as the RMLL 2011 :)